Economics

Think your boss will try to keep you if you get a job offer? Think again. Remember Iceland, the meltdown poster child before Greece became the meltdown poster child?

Not only is Iceland in the midst of removing its capital controls, its Statistics agency reported today that the economy expanded by 2.9 per cent in the first quarter over a year earlier. Iceland’s economy blew up up during the financial crisis, with banks failing, stocks melting down and its currency collapsing.

(So much so that some economists suggested the tiny island country adopt the Canadian dollar, which Ottawa was willing to consider though that obviously did not come to pass.)
Max Roser sur Twitter : "The rising number of equations per paper shows the increasing mathematization of #economics. The use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar's academic career. Espinosa, Miguel and Rondon, Carlos and Romero, Mauricio (2012): The use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar's academic career.

This is the latest version of this item. There has been so much debate on the increasing use of formal mathematical methods in Economics. Although there are some studies tackling these issues, those use either a little amount of papers, a small amount of scholars or cover a short period of time. We try to overcome these challenges constructing a database characterizing the main socio demographic and academic output of a survey of 438 scholars divided into three groups: Economics Nobel Prize winners; scholars awarded with at least one of six prestigious recognitions in Economics; and academic faculty randomly selected from the top twenty Economics departments worldwide.

World Economic Forum sur Twitter : "ICYMI: Why #inequality is different in #Japan @ecoyuri #economics #Piketty. Why inequality is different in Japan. TOKYO – Six months after Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century generated so much buzz in the United States and Europe, it has become a bestseller in Japan.

But vast differences between Japan and its developed counterparts in the West, mean that, like so many other Western exports, Piketty's argument has taken on unique characteristics. Piketty's main assertion is that the leading driver of increased inequality in the developed world is the accumulation of wealth by those who are already wealthy, driven by a rate of return on capital that consistently exceeds the rate of GDP growth. Japan, however, has lower levels of inequality than almost every other developed country. Indeed, though it has long been an industrial powerhouse, Japan is frequently called the world's most successful communist country. Japan has a high income-tax rate for the rich (45%), and the inheritance tax rate recently was raised to 55%.
My beautiful campus. #CUDenver #Denver #Colorado...
United Replaces Unionized Baggage Handlers With Minimum Wage Contractors, Things Instantly Fall Apart. “Free Market” hardliners may not like to hear it, but the old adage is true: “You get what you pay for,” and paying people next-to-nothing to do an extremely labor-intensive job won’t get you many willing applicants.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in Denver right now, where travel-wary passengers getting off their flights are discovering that their checked bags won’t be coming out in a timely fashion, if at all. One survivor told the Denver Post that the situation was so bad in baggage claim that people were on the cusp of rioting. “Ed Tonini of Louisville, Ky., flew to Denver on a United Express flight this week. His small bag, which he checked at the gate, took about 30 minutes to retrieve.

But nothing could have prepared him for the baggage claim area, which he said was utter chaos. Two hours to get bags out into baggage claim? Baggage Delays For @united Express At @DENAirport DIA pic.twitter.com/q419KzyyCr— Airline News (@Airline___News) January 5, 2015. The Economics of Seinfeld. Slower but not scary: China’s economy 2014-11-11. Prisoner's Dilemma In Real Life.

Obama's biggest economic policy mistake. Barack Obama has not accomplished nearly as much as his most fervent supporters — or, indeed, the president himself — had hoped he would during the 2008 campaign.

Paul Krugman decries the “enormous intellectual failure” of modern economics. In his latest column for the New York Times, award-winning economist and liberal pundit Paul Krugman returns to one of his recurring themes and tries to understand how the field of economics could not only fail to predict the economic catastrophe of 2008, but fail to ensure policymakers in the West responded to it with pro-growth, countercyclical spending.

“[I]t’s important to realize that the enormous intellectual failure of recent years took place at several levels,” Krugman writes. “In what sense did economics go astray?” One of the first places to look, Krugman argues, is at the field’s recent deification of free-market economics and the “neoclassical models” that support its proponents.

“[I]dealized models have a useful role to play in economics,” Krugman grants. “But starting in the 1980s it became harder and harder to publish anything questioning these idealized models in major journals.”
When it comes to a China growth slowdown, bad news is actually good news. News that Chinese factories are pumping out goods at the slowest pace since the height of the global financial crisis sent share prices and commodities reeling today.

And it wasn’t a blip: power generation fell 0.6% versus Aug. 2013, down from 5.3% growth in July. Finally—some cheery Chinese economic news! No, really. The fact that even as the housing market has tanked, premier Li Keqiang (who is thought to head up China’s economic planning) and central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan haven’t added new stimulus measures is heartening.
Oil Price Plunge? It's The Global Economy, Stupid!
The decline in the price of oil - in the face of surging geopolitical pandemonium - has been lauded as indicative of both US' awesomeness in energy independence and a tax cut for Americans... but, as the following chart suggests, there may be another - much more realistic - explanation for why oil is plunging... demand!

World GDP expectations for 2014 just tumbled to their lowest since estimates started...
Economics isn’t science or literature - Columnists. In 1959, British physicist CP Snow gave a lecture called “The Two Cultures”, in which he lamented the cultural divide between literary intellectuals and scientists.

Having been a research assistant in a physics lab and a published novelist, he knew a thing or two about both. The upshot of his argument was that literary types tend not to know anything about science or technology, while science types tend not to know anything about high culture, to the detriment of the nation as a whole. Since 1959, Snow’s dichotomy has become common knowledge; at Stanford, we talked about “techies” and “fuzzies” as if never the twain shall meet.

As a physics major who wrote short stories for fun, I was a little bit like Snow.
South Africa News. Marxism: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. More than a century after his death, Karl Marx remains one of the most controversial figures in the Western world.

His relentless criticism of capitalism and his corresponding promise of an inevitable, harmonious socialist future inspired a revolution of global proportions. It seemed that—with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the spread of communism throughout Eastern Europe—the Marxist dream had firmly taken root during the first half of the twentieth century. That dream collapsed before the century had ended. The people of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and the USSR rejected Marxist ideology and entered a remarkable transition toward private property rights and the market-exchange system, one that is still occurring.

Which aspects of Marxism created such a powerful revolutionary force?
Transformers 4 is a master class in economics. Transformers: Age of Extinction is the fourth Transformers movie made by Michael Bay, and it's inarguably one of the four best Transformers movies Michael Bay has ever made. Even so, a lot of "critics" seem to have misread the movie entirely.
Databases. How ISIS is exploiting the economics of Syria's civil war. The guy who beat Eric Cantor penned a scathing, seemingly unpublished book about the economics profession.

Blogs.worldbank. Noam Chomsky (2014) "How to Ruin an Economy; Some Simple Ways". Taking-on-adam-smith-and-karl-marx. Photo PARIS — Thomas Piketty turned 18 in 1989, when the fell, so he was spared the tortured, decades-long French intellectual debate about the virtues and vices of communism.
The farm bill: A trillion in the trough. CBO: Obamacare Is A Tax On Work, May Cut Full-Time Workforce By 2.5 Million. Economics Daily Digest: Progressives have a lot to celebrate and fight for. By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.
US economy grew at surprise 2.8% rate in 3rd quarter. US economy grew at surprise 2.8% rate in 3rd quarter. Market Awaits 'Unprecedented' Reforms In China. Emerging economies: The Great Deceleration. WHEN a champion sprinter falls short of his best speeds, it takes a while to determine whether he is temporarily on poor form or has permanently lost his edge.

The same is true with emerging markets, the world economy’s 21st-century sprinters. After a decade of surging growth, in which they led a global boom and then helped pull the world economy forwards in the face of the financial crisis, the emerging giants have slowed sharply. China will be lucky if it manages to hit its official target of 7.5% growth in 2013, a far cry from the double-digit rates that the country had come to expect in the 2000s.

America’s public finances: The Unsteady States of America. Λόγος. The biggest obstacle to a stronger economic recovery. Sometimes, a simple, eight-word headline can say quite a bit: “Fed Chief Calls Congress Biggest Obstacle to Growth.” The Federal Reserve’s chairman, Ben S.
Access: Reflections on studying up in Hollywood. IMF Warns Of Global Slowdown. International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde on Sunday singled out the U.S. Congress for failing to avert across-the-board spending cuts that slow down potential for growth.
Formal Broadband Plans Spur Economic and Social Development. Two Asian nations – Korea and Singapore — have managed to leapfrog multiple stages of economic development and have transformed into economic miracles. This comes as no accident, in part, because both have taken a planned approach to technological development, starting with national broadband plans, which has led to increased broadband adoption, and successive waves of economic growth.

A new report by the UN Broadband Commission and Cisco shows that Korea and Singapore are the most notable examples of a statistically significant trend -- Countries that embrace national broadband plans have increased broadband adoption.
Canuckish : The efficiency of private...
News Republic. The Independent Friday, June 28, 2013 9:18 AM GMT. International Labor Markets: All Tree, No Forest by Jeff Van Geete on Prezi. Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail. Sal Khan @ MIT. Starship Citizens. Guns end a lot more conversations than they start, which means they're probably not an ingredient for cohesive societies. Moreover, how can these weapons be the sole protection of 'inalienable' human rights, given by God, when they were only invented 600 years ago?

How Nations Succeed: What's the Secret to Ending Poverty?
Austerity's Spreadsheet Error - The Colbert Report - 2013-23-04. Austerity's Spreadsheet Error - Thomas Herndon - The Colbert Report - 2013-23-04. Reinhart, Rogoff Backing Furiously Away From Austerity Movement. Under steady attack after their seminal research was found to be riddled with errors, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are making a show of backing away from the austerity that their research encouraged. They claim that their views on austerity have never changed, but the record tells a different story. They're still trying to have it both ways -- advocating for government belt-tightening while trying to avoid being seen as political. For those readers who have spent the past month held prisoner by the Sleestaks from "The Land Of The Lost," let me catch you up: Reinhart and Rogoff wrote a paper back in January 2010, called "Growth In A Time Of Debt," which strongly suggested that government debt of more than 90 percent of gross domestic product caused bad things to happen to economies.